Play-in-place movies now available in Disease Models & Mechanisms

Disease Models & Mechanisms, along with the other journals of The Company of Biologists, has recently introduced the option of playing movies in place on the full-text online version of its articles. This means that videos can now be an integral part of any article and that they are placed into the full-text online version of the article, making it easier and quicker for readers to access this type of content. In order to provide this service, we have partnered with Glencoe Software.

For an example of an article with a play-in-place movie, please click here.

20 March 2018

preLights goes live

The Company of Biologists, the publisher of Disease Models & Mechanisms, has launched preLights, a new preprint highlights service, run by the biological community.

preLights has a dedicated team of scientists from the community who regularly select, highlight and comment on preprints they feel are of interest to the biological community. You’ll find a summary of each preprint, the reasons it was selected and the selector’s thoughts on its significance. You might also see relevant comments from the preprints’ authors and we strongly encourage website visitors to join in the conversation.

DMM introduces continuous publication

We are very pleased to announce that The Company of Biologists’ journals, including Disease Models & Mechanisms, are introducing continuous publication. This means that as soon as an article is ready to be published, it will be immediately released online rather than waiting for other articles in the issue to be completed, resulting in faster access to the final version of the article.

By moving to a continuous publication model, we are making research available for the community as quickly as possible, which is beneficial for both readers and authors.

The Company of Biologists supports open citations

At The Company of Biologists, the publisher of Disease Models & Mechanisms, we realise how important citations are within a scientific article. Not only do they serve to give credit where credit is due, but they are also key in helping us understand the developments within a scientific field, and encourage the reproducibility and evaluation of research. As The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) puts it: ‘Citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.’

This is why we choose to support this important initiative I4OC and ensure that the citation data in all of our journals is freely accessible. It means that everyone can access the citation data for all articles, even if they cannot access the scientific article itself. This is done by depositing reference lists with Crossref and ensuring the citation data is open, both for future articles, and also for all articles in our online archives.

For more information on this initiative and the publishers who support it, visit https://i4oc.org/.

6 October 2017

DMM introduces format-free submission

At DMM, we are committed to making submission as easy as possible for our authors. We realise that submitting a paper to any journal can be a lengthy process: authors are asked to comply with detailed journal-specific guidelines without knowing whether the paper will be accepted or even peer-reviewed. We are therefore delighted to announce our new format-free submission policy.

Authors can now submit a paper to DMM in any format. We will only ask what is absolutely necessary at submission. This means that, as long as an article adheres to our guidelines on length and the text and figures are easily viewable by reviewers, we only require information that is necessary to confirm the identities of all authors. This does mean that other requirements, such as file formats and sizes, our submission checklist, and provision of funding information, will move to the revision stage – at which point over 95% of papers will be accepted for publication.

As part of this change, and recognising the importance of comprehensive Materials and Methods sections to aid transparency and reproducibility, we are also removing the Materials and Methods section from our length limit to an article. The aim is to allow authors the space they need to describe their methods in sufficient detail for readers to fully understand and replicate the experiments conducted.

DMM supports preprints – two-way integration with bioRxiv

The Company of Biologists and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s preprint server bioRxiv are delighted to announce two-way integration of their manuscript submission systems, operated by Bench>Press (HighWire Press).

Authors depositing a manuscript in bioRxiv can now transfer their paper directly to any of The Company of Biologists’ journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, DMM and Biology Open) through a simple transfer portal – avoiding the need to re-enter information or upload files in multiple submission systems.

In addition, authors submitting a manuscript to any of The Company of Biologists’ journals can deposit their article in bioRxiv through a simple one-click process in the journal's submission system. Once deposited through this optional service, the unrefereed manuscript will become free for anyone to read almost immediately, regardless of the editorial decision made at the journal. It will be citable with a bioRxiv DOI, and its usage can be tracked. This system has been in place at Development for several months. Feedback has been positive and the service is now being extended to all the Company’s journals.

Through these services, The Company of Biologists aims to support authors in making their research available to the community at an early stage – before peer review and formal publication.

17 November 2016

ORCID iD required for corresponding authors

We have recently signed the ORCID agreement, joining the growing number of publishers who recognize the value of widespread ORCID adoption and require ORCID iDs to be provided at submission by their authors.

ORCID provides a unique identifier for all researchers that can be linked to their different research works and activities across multiple platforms. It also serves to distinguish authors with similar names and simplify searching of publications databases (such as PubMed, Scopus, etc.) to avoid retrieving articles by authors with the same name.

During the submission process, the corresponding author will be required to provide an ORCID iD and we encourage authors to use ORCID iDs to identify each researcher.

Data accessibility made easy with Dryad

We are delighted to announce that The Company of Biologists journals, including DMM, are partnering with the Dryad data repository to support authors in making the data underlying their research available to the community, and to better integrate data accessibility with manuscript submission.

For many years, DMM has encouraged authors to make data that cannot be included as ‘flat’ figures available to readers upon publication. Several appropriate field-specific repositories exist where authors can deposit data for community access. DMM requires that such data are made available at the time of publication, and encourages authors to deposit at an early stage so that referees can review the data behind the paper.

However, issues of data availability apply across all fields and data types and, in many cases, there is no specific repository for the deposition of data. In some cases, relevant data can be made available as part of the Supplementary Information, but this is not always appropriate (particularly given the large file sizes that are often involved). To overcome this problem, a number of general purpose data repositories have been developed that allow researchers to submit data packages in almost any format, and can be accessed and cited by the community. In addition, they allow your files to be permanently and safely archived. Where appropriate, DMM encourages authors to submit data to repositories such as Dryad and figshare.

Our partnership with Dryad will now allow authors to submit their data packages at the time of manuscript submission, so that the data can be made securely available to referees and then automatically made public, if and when the paper is published. Dryad charges a small fee, but waivers are available for submissions from low-income or lower-middle-income economies. Data packages are given a permanent, citable DOI and bidirectional linking between the data and the paper will help readers easily access the relevant files. We are not changing our policies regarding deposition, but hope to make it easier for authors to deposit data where they wish to do so. Our staff and editors can provide advice to authors on what types of data should ideally be made available, so please feel free to get in touch with any queries. More information on Dryad can also be found here. We welcome your feedback on this new partnership.